Stories by David Strom

There are plenty of cities in the U.S. that want to lay claim to becoming the "next" Silicon Valley, but a dusty desert town in the south of Israel called Beersheva might actually have a shot at becoming something more modest, and more focused. They want to be the first place you think about when it comes to cybersecurity research, education, and innovation. If things go right there, it may well happen.

Server and systems management tools have long been too expensive and too complex to actually use without spending thousands of dollars on consultants. Uptime Software has been trying to change that with a product that can be installed and useful within an hour. We tested the latest version (7.3.1) on a small network of Windows physical and virtual machines.

If you are ultra paranoid, what could be better than hiding your network traffic in such a way that no one could possibly intercept it? This is what Unisys is offering with its new Stealth appliance, which could make man-in-the-middle attacks and keylogger exploits obsolete, or at least more difficult to mount.

The Apple Mac has played an important part of my professional journalism career for at least 20 of the years that I have been a writer. One Mac or another has been my main writing machine since 1990, and has been in daily use, traveling around the world several times and my more-or-less constant work companion. It is a tool not a religion, yet I have been quite fond of the various machines that I have used.

For enterprises trying to get a handle on password management, the good news is that there are products that can help implement stronger password policies for end users logging into corporate and personal Web-based services, as well as for employees who share a local server login.

We all know that relying on a simple user ID and password combination is fraught with peril. One alternative is to use one of the single sign-on solutions we reviewed last year, but there are less expensive options that could also be easier to install.

As businesses make more use of social networks, the number of engagement, analysis and monitoring tools has exploded. Enterprises are trying to understand their return on social media investments, to find out if their Twitter and Facebook marketing campaigns are actually delivering customers. They want to track social mentions across multiple networks and be responsive to both kudos and complaints.

We are awash in passwords, and as the number of Web services increases, things are only going to get worse. Trying to manage all these individual passwords is a major problem for enterprise security. Many end users cope by re-using their passwords, which exposes all sorts of security holes.

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